Exploring terrestrial ecosystem ecology

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Research

Areas of Research Interest

Global Change Ecology

Terrestrial Biogeochemistry

Soil Ecology

Plant Ecology

Motivation and Research Approach

One of the primary challenges of the 21st Century is to predict how ecosystems, and the services they provide, will respond to perturbations such as climate change. This knowledge will permit us to manage and adapt to change.

Accuracy of prediction – the statement of what will occur in the future – is highly uncertain. Uncertainty is greatest when the system you’re studying is complex. And ecosystems are complex entities: physics, chemistry, biology and society interact to structure how they work. If we can reduce uncertainty, we can develop management plans that are specific and likely to succeed.

Our lab is trying to reduce uncertainty in prediction of ecosystem response to perturbation.

At the core of our approaches are two guiding principles:

To test how well ecological theory (i.e. how we currently believe the world works) predicts ecosystem response.

To test the validity of assumptions made in ecosystem models (i.e. the tools used to predict how ecosystems respond).

If you like, we take what we think we know about how ecosystems work and throw it against the wall. If it sticks, then we can have increased confidence in our predictions. If it doesn’t, then we need to revise it.

Ongoing Research

The general theme of all our projects is to understand how individual, population and community responses to environmental change affect ecosystem processes and properties, such as soil carbon storage.

We conduct this work in the lab and field, primarily in forests and grasslands of the eastern U.S.

The best way to generate a picture of what we’re currently working on is to check out some of our recent manuscripts on the Publications page (pdfs are available there). But if you want the 15 second summary:

Investigating how soil microbial physiology and community structure, under different temperatures and plant-root inputs, influence soil-carbon formation and decomposition, and hence ultimately soil organic matter stocks

Delineating the niche requirements of prevalent, plant invaders, as well as their effects on ecosystem carbon and nitrogen dynamics, so we can model their distributions and the associated biogeochemical impacts as they further invade ecosystems

Why do such work? First, we enjoy it. Second, it advances knowledge of how the world works. Third, we hope that at least some of it helps motivate and shape how we act to improve the environment for us, and the other organisms with which we share our world.